Oscars 2011: How 'The Social Network' Could Still Win (but Probably Won't)

In the final hours before the Academy Awards, a look at the factors that are affecting the Best Picture race

A.M.P.A.S.

Just a few weeks ago, the Oscars were approaching and all seemed
right with the world. The Social Network, David Fincher's riveting
meditation on the messiness behind the creation of Facebook, was every critic's choice for movie of the year.
Its sparkling script, by Aaron Sorkin, and Fincher's restrained but
typically adamantine direction created an indelible portrait of a modern
antihero.

Then Hollywood started talking. The
director's guild, the producer's guild, and then, fatefully, the actors
guild all spoke, with one voice, in favor of The King's Speech, Tom
Hooper's evocation of how Britain's King George VI learned to overcome
his stutter. While boasting an enjoyable performance by Colin Firth as
the troubled monarch, the thing is cinematically workmanlike and
woefully predictable. (It's not as if anyone would make a movie about
someone not overcoming a stutter.)

But this all made for
a fun and unthreatening night out, and Hollywood—which at Oscar time
has been rewarding more challenging movie-going experiences of late—nevertheless has almost unanimously given every award that wasn't nailed
down to the Weinstein Company production.

To Social Network fans, to put it bluntly, The King's Speech has become a royal pain in the ass.

Not everyone is happy. Jeffrey Wells, the emotional and energetic proprietor of Hollywood Elsewhere,
has called The King's Speech "a high-end buddy flick." Wells deemed it a
"cultural-spiritual tragedy" that the film won the Director's Guild of
America honors.

Roger Ebert, less melodramatically, agreed:

If
I were still doing "If We Picked the Winners" with Gene Siskel, my
preference for best film would be "The Social Network." It was not only
the best film of 2010, but also one of those films that helps define a
year. It became the presumed front-runner on the day it opened, but then
it seemed to fade.

If you are a King's Speech hater—or
just think, more defensibly, that's it's a nice film a cut or two above
the ordinary—there are just a few areas of hope.

One is that there are a few discernible cracks in its façade. The thinking on
best direction, for example, is that Fincher might pull out a win. He
lost the director's guild award to Hooper, and that's generally a fairly dispositive result. But the British Film Institute, while predictably
lavishing plaudits on The King's Speech, gave direction to Fincher over
Hooper, who you think would have been a hometown hero.

It used to be extremely unusual for best direction and best picture to go
to different films—perhaps one year in ten. But it has happened three
times in the last decade, though the last time was in 2005, when Crash
took best picture and Ang Lee won best director for Brokeback Mountain.

Second
is the effect of preferential voting—another recent process change by
the Academy. In the past, voters marked only a top choice on their
ballots. With five nominees, it was theoretically possible for a winner
to take the award with a bit over 20 percent of the vote.

But now, with the expansion to ten best picture nominees, the voters rank
all ten of the films. (Or are supposed to, anyway.) Here's how the
accountants tally the vote: If there is no clear majority winner on the
first round, they eliminate the lowest vote-getter—and apportion that
film's second-tier votes to the remaining nine films. The process is
continued until a film hits the 50 percent mark. (There are about 6,000
academy voters, incidentally.)

You can see how this
process could affect the outcome in various ways. In the most extreme
case, a film loved by a devoted percentage of the voters (say, 35
percent) but reviled by the remaining 65 percent might come out on top
in the first round of balloting--yet never see its tally increase.

To
some, preferential voting has the danger of always rewarding the
inoffensive. But it's a little trickier than that. To game out the
scenario each year, you have to guess first what the lowest vote-getter
in each round will be, and then where that film's second-place votes
will be apportioned. Since the academy never releases voting data, it's
necessarily a highly theoretical process.

Here's the one
scenario fans of adventuresome filmmaking can take solace in. This
year, if you assume The Social Network and The King's Speech are at the
top and at least close in the beginning rounds, the question is where
the second-round votes of presumed dark horses like Winter's Bone and
The Kids Are All Right might go. My guess is that such voters would be
more likely to rank The Social Network higher.

Of, even if they did the numbers might be small enough not to make a difference. We'll never know.

For true award-tally crunchers, there is the fact that the sophisticated
American Cinema Editors gave a best picture win to The Social Network.
For a pained and exhaustive analysis of the implications, see this essay by Awards Daily's Sasha Stone.

And
finally, there is my pet theory, one that I think is not recognized
enough by analysts. It's simply not true anymore that the Academy has a
thing for high-minded films like The King's Speech. Very few "nice"
films have won best picture in the last decade. A few were downers but
fairly wholesome (Million Dollar Baby). But for the last four years, the
films have been violent, unusual, bleak and unnerving. And the
nominations lists have been dotted with even more difficult contenders.

It's
another Oscar truism that The Social Network was hurt by having been
released too early in the year—but The Hurt Locker was released even
earlier. The Academy's current predilections are plain.

All
that said, The King's Speech has a lot more going for it. The
importance of the guild votes over those of the critics organizations is
that their memberships heavily overlap with the Academy's. Since actors
make up the largest segment of the voting pool, the results of the Screen Actors Guild awards are seen as particularly indicative.

And
finally, there is the Harvey Weinstein factor. The longtime Miramax
Films capo, who revolutionized Oscar campaigns over the last twenty or
so years, is still in the business, heading up the Weinstein Company.

Even
during several years of wasteful debacles in the publishing, fashion,
and Internet worlds, Weinstein has continued to be a contentious
presence at Oscars time. And this year, as part of a major PR campaign
to demonstrate to Hollywood he has jettisoned the distraction and is
back focusing the bulk of his energy on filmmaking, Weinstein has
something to prove. The company is focused heavily on promoting The
King's Speech; this alone is a sobering consideration.

If, as expected, a Weinstein company gets its fourth production Oscar, what
lessons can we glean for the Academy's recent rule changes?

While
the ten-film best picture lineup has brought in a couple of box-office
blockbusters into the mix—namely Inception and Toy Story 3—they have
been largely out of the discussions. Indeed, if anything the lack of a
best director nod to Christopher Nolan has only polarized Inception
fans—and it's hard to imagine parents will keep their kids up late in
anticipation of a Pixar win.

The Academy itself cares
about one thing: Show ratings. They got a boost last year, presumably
because of Avatar's inclusion in the race. Were people turned off when a
film they'd never heard of, The Hurt Locker, came out on top? Will
middling $100 million hits like The King's Speech and The Social Network
put keisters in the seats this year? And do James Franco and Anne
Hathaway really have the star power to host the Academy Awards? We'll
find out Sunday.